The Serenade

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This is an unfinished picture, painted around 1858, and known since at least 1924 as 'The Serenade'. The subject is actually a strolling player singing in a garden restaurant. Daumier was fascinated by itinerant street performers and also drew and painted circus shows, carnivals and saltimbanques – a common sight at street corners in nineteenth-century Paris. This kind of subject prefigures Degas’s and Manet’s modern life images of cafés-concerts which were a feature of their work in the 1870s.